On Election Day, President Trump will face either one of two Democratic challengers, Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden. Conservatives ought to pray it’s the latter, and if they are planning on voting in a Democratic primary, it had better be for Biden.
The moral case for backing Biden is obvious enough. We live in a two-party republic, and at the absolute lowest of estimates, the Democratic nominee will attract at least 60 million votes and set the party agenda for the rest of the year if not longer. Every conservative ought to understand how socially corrosive it would be for an entire political party to coalesce around socialism, even if that candidate lost in the end.
Biden is bumbling, and his competence is crumbling with age, but at least he is fundamentally a capitalist, a liberal, and a man who respects faith. At his absolute most effective, and that’s assuming Republicans lose the Senate and fail to reclaim the House, his presidency would look like that of Barack Obama’s but with a botched public option. We would survive.
Biden polls better against Trump in some crucial swing states than the Vermont senator, so it’s likely that a primary vote for Biden translates to a slightly diminished shot of a Trump victory in a general. But backing Biden in the primary, if you choose to participate in the Democratic election at all, is still the conservative thing to do, not only out of the principle of refusing to normalize socialism and having half the country rally around it but also because Sanders might win if nominated.
The coronavirus panic aside, voters love Trump’s America, even if they dislike Trump on a personal level. They report record confidence in their personal finances, record satisfaction in their personal lives, and record improvement in their personal situations than under any other president up for reelection.
By any objective measure, Trump will be an extremely tough incumbent to beat, barring a recession before Election Day. But if there is a recession, Sanders could win. In the absolute, best-case scenario for conservatives, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would be able to stop “Medicare for all” and the Green New Deal and stave off the absolute worst of his Cabinet appointees. But even if McConnell could block Attorney General Keith Ellison and Treasury Secretary Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that wouldn’t stop radical House members Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan from dictating his foreign policy, the area where presidents have the most unchecked power.
Biden is a dedicated ally to Israel. Members of Sanders’s campaign want to wipe the nation off the map. Sanders would weaponize the Justice Department to advance his woke agenda and obstruct religious liberty in a way Biden simply does not have the feeling or fervor to do. And that’s not to mention the way that a Sanders win or even a nomination would irrevocably shift the Overton window of the Democratic Party. The millions of Americans whose families fled communist hellholes to come to here would see their worst fears realized, with half the nation’s political apparatus reoriented around the destruction of individual liberties and disdain for liberal values.
Earlier today, fellow Washington Examiner writer Tim Carney argued that voting for Biden is not conservative, largely because of Biden’s stances on abortion:
It’s true that Biden’s position on abortion may render him unacceptable to conservatives in a general election, but we have to be thinking about which Democrat is more acceptable as president. There’s no question that Biden would be better on that and every other issue than Sanders.
For starters, although Biden recently flip-flopped (and flipped again) on the Hyde Amendment (which limits taxpayer financing of abortions), his record provides two concrete details. First, he has never bought into the leftist obsession with abortion being a positive good, and contrary to Tim’s assertion, there is little evidence that Biden supports legalizing abortion past the fetal viability mark as defined in Roe v. Wade. And under Biden, as under Obama, abortions would likely continue to decrease just because of Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate and increases to Title X funding.
That may not be a good enough reason to vote for Biden over Trump, but that’s a stellar reason to want Biden over Sanders, who would surely push far past codifying Roe, would turn physicians into public employees who could not refuse to perform abortions, and unintentionally gut contraception accessibility with the disaster of “Medicare for all.”
Open primaries do parties a disservice, but if you’re a conservative who wishes to cross the aisle in the primary, Biden is your only option.
